Escape Artist: An Interview with Guy Delisle

Last month, the Quebecois cartoonist Guy Delisle met with Simon Ostrovsky, a journalist for CNN and documentary filmmaker, onstage at Housing Works, in New York, to talk about Delisle’s new book, Hostage. The 436-page comic tells the story of the kidnapping of Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) administrator Christophe André in Chechnya in 1997 and his detention, for 111 days, in solitary confinement, chained to a radiator. In his minimal line and with his personable observational style, Delisle, who now lives in the South of France, has also made travelogues of life in Burma, P’yǒngyang, Jerusalem, and Shenzhen. Ostrovsky has reported extensively on North Korea, the West Bank, and Ukraine, where he was captured and imprisoned for three days in 2014. These overlapping experiences in life and work produced a fruitful conversation on storytelling and journalism, the anxiety of living in dangerous places, and André’s uniquely psychological ordeal. —Ed.

OSTROVSKY

I had the pleasure of reading both Hostage and your earlier book, Pyongyang, and it turns out we share a lot of interests. I covered Chechnya and the North Caucasus in Russia, and I also covered the issue of North Korean laborers working all around the world and earning money for the North Korean regime—that was an obsession of mine for two years. I was looking at it from the perspective of the North Koreans sending their workers out of the country to earn hard currency for this currency-starved regime, and I never had any idea that, as a Westerner, you could actually come into the country and work there, and that’s what Pyongyang, your book, is about. How did you end up working in North Korea?

DELISLE

I was there in May of 2001, before September 11, when North Korea became the rogue state, the axis of evil and all that.